Český Krumlov

Where it sits. Český Krumlov occupies a tight double meander of the upper Vltava in South Bohemia, about 25 kilometres southwest of České Budějovice and 170 from Prague. The river loops twice around a rock spur, and the medieval town was built inside those loops while the castle took the ridge above them, which is why the place photographs like a model railway layout: from the castle's Cloak Bridge you look down on roofs, weirs and the church tower with water on three sides. The population is only around 13,000. The historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992, listed for the near-complete survival of a small central European feudal town.

The story behind it. The Vítkovci lords built the first castle here in the mid-thirteenth century; the Rožmberk (Rosenberg) family held it from 1302 to 1602 and turned it into one of the wealthiest seats in Bohemia, adding Renaissance ranges and the painted decoration that still covers the round tower. Rudolf II bought the estate in 1602, the Eggenbergs took it in 1622 and the Schwarzenbergs held it from 1719 until 1947. The castle complex is the second largest in the Czech Republic after Prague's, and its rarest component is the Baroque theatre built for Johann Christian I of Eggenberg in 1680–1682 and re-equipped for Joseph Adam of Schwarzenberg in 1765–1766. It survives with its original stage machinery, painted scenery flats and props intact — one of only a handful in the world — which is why it stages performances just a few times a year, under strict conditions, with candles replaced by carefully filtered electric light.

On screen. The town's biggest international credit is the one it is least eager to advertise. Eli Roth's Hostel (2005) is set in Slovakia but never went there: principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, with many scenes shot in Český Krumlov, while the torture-chamber sequences were filmed in a wing of a Prague hospital that had stood abandoned since 1917. The film's shabby, menacing eastern-European town is this UNESCO-listed one, redressed and underlit. The town has a gentler filmography too — it played the childhood village in The Illusionist (2006), whose imperial Vienna was assembled from Prague and Tábor, and it appeared in The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996) and the 1999 television Scarlet Pimpernel. Location scouts keep coming back for the same reason: the lanes carry no modern shopfronts of consequence, and the river-and-roofs composition needs no set dressing at all.

What you actually see today. The castle is entered from Latrán, the old craftsmen's street across the river from the town centre, and the moat below the first courtyard still holds bears — an animal kept here since the sixteenth century in reference to the Rožmberks' claimed kinship with the Roman Orsini. Above, the multi-level Cloak Bridge carries the covered walkway from the castle to the theatre and the terraced Baroque gardens, and gives the single best view in town. Down in the loop, Náměstí Svornosti is the sloping main square with an eighteenth-century plague column; St Vitus Church, begun in the 1400s and finished in 1439, has a tall net-vaulted Gothic interior that comes as a surprise after the small streets, and its tower is the counterweight to the castle tower in every view of the town. The Eggenberg brewery, working in the town since the sixteenth century, still supplies the pubs on Latrán with beer brewed a few hundred metres from where it is drunk. The Egon Schiele Art Centrum, opened in 1993 in a converted brewery building, marks the painter's stay here in 1911 — his mother came from the town, and the locals eventually ran him out over his models and his habits.

Getting there and timing. Regional trains and buses connect Prague and České Budějovice with Český Krumlov in roughly three hours and one hour respectively; the bus station is closer to the centre than the railway station, which sits above the town. Day-trip coaches from Prague and from Salzburg arrive mid-morning and leave by late afternoon, and the difference between a night here and a day here is enormous — after six in the evening the lanes empty. Summer weekends are the busiest, particularly during the Five-Petalled Rose Festival in June, when the town stages a Renaissance pageant in costume. Paddling the Vltava through and out of town in a canoe or raft is a local industry, with short runs down to Zlatá Koruna and Boršov. Almost everything is cobbled and steep, several castle courtyards are reached only by steps, and the theatre in particular has no step-free route.